Public Schools in Australia from the late 1970s to the ...erpjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/ERPV37-2.-Barcan-A.-2010... · Education Research and Perspectives, Vol.37, No.2

Education Research and Perspectives, Vol.37, No.2

1

Public Schools in Australia from the late 1970s to

the late 1980s: the Seeds of Change

Alan Barcan

The University of Newcastle

The period from the late 1970s to the late 1980s were transition years for most

public (government) school systems in Australia. A reaction was developing against

the neo-progressive and radical (neo-Marxist) innovations of the late 1960s and

1970s such as school-based curricula, activity methods, and “open education”. By

the early 1980s the emerging economic rationalist, neo-liberal ideas favoured

devolution of administrative responsibilities to schools (“the entrepreneurial

school”), central control of the curriculum, and an emphasis on vocational training.

This change was facilitated by a new form of political control of the administration:

ministers for education, premiers and prime ministers and their political advisers

determined policy, no longer relying heavily the advice of educational

professionals. A new senior executive level in Departments was staffed by

politically-approved administrators. Neo-liberal education was enthusiastically

adopted in New South Wales and at the Commonwealth level. Victoria soon joined

in; Tasmania and Queensland lagged behind.

Introduction

Australian education from the late 1970s to the late 1980s bridged

two socio-economic “revolutions”. The first, which was beginning to

weaken, had originated in the cultural revolution of 1967-74 and was

associated with the New Left. It hastened the disintegration of the

long-established traditions of liberal humanism, abandoning the

transmission of the western cultural heritage as a significant

educational aim. Its neo-progressive wing promoted “open

education”; both its radical and its neo-progressive wings supported

the school-based curriculum. In the 1970s multiculturalism, or more

broadly social pluralism, began to fill the ideological vacuum,

finding expression in the flowering of special interest groups and

identity politics and, in the schools, the promotion of inclusive

principles. We will consider it in more detail below.

Address for Correspondence: Dr. Alan Barcan, The University of

Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan, New South Wales, 2308.

Email: [email protected].

Alan Barcan

2

The second revolution, which originated in the early 1980s, was to

culminate in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Categorised as neo-

liberalism or economic rationalism, it was critical of the expensive

welfare state. It favoured private enterprise and competition, the

privatisation of state instrumentalities, and the application of

business principles and business-like structures to a range of social

institutions, including government schools. The advent of this new

philosophy was associated with economic expansion, a globally-

oriented economy, a low birth-rate, massive immigration, and the

inability of the education and training system to produce a sufficient

supply of adolescents with technical skills. The 1980s saw the

gradual politicisation of the public service and the senior

administration. The restructuring of government departments to give

greater control by the minister was often facilitated by a financial

crisis. The new level of political control of education in the later

1980s facilitated change.

The abandonment of the liberal humanist-realist tradition and the

Anglo-Celtic version of the cultural heritage, coupled with the

advent of the pluralist multicultural society, had undermined the

possibility of a dominant philosophy or ideology of education. The

neo-progressives of the 1970s, like the original, relatively few,

progressives of the 1940s and „50s, favoured child-centred, activity-

oriented education. But while the pioneers had quietly endorsed

traditional values, their successors did not. They championed “open

education”, whose five or six possible meanings discouraged the

indoctrination of strong, specific beliefs.i

“Social justice” and varieties of progressive education appealed to

many in the Labor Left. Neo-Marxism attracted the more radical

educationists, but this philosophy soon transmuted into a low-level

sociology adopting the guise of “critical theory”. The more right-

wing educationists sowed the seeds of economic rationalism by

arguing for a stronger vocational aim and, occasionally, for a revival

of the traditional knowledge-oriented curriculum.

Public Schools in Australia from the late 1970s to the late 1980s

3

Multiculturalism, or more broadly the development of a pluralist

society, had produced a number of identity groups, “tribes”, or

special interest groups which exerted pressure on the educational

system. Many students from non-English-speaking backgrounds

posed difficulties.

Official statements by Departments of Education of the aims of

education became evasive. Acquisition of mental skills rather than

mastery of content or commitment to a specific interpretation was

favoured. The 1977 “Aims of Primary Education in New South

Wales” revealed a cautious vision: “The central aim of education,

which, with home and community groups, the school pursues, is to

guide individual development in the context of society through

recognisable stages of development towards perceptive

understanding, mature judgment, responsible self-direction and

moral autonomy”. An editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald

sympathised with primary school teachers “who have to read the

latest cloudy generalisations issued by the Department of

Education”.ii

In April 1978 H. E. Bedford, NSW Minister for Education, warned

that social conditions encouraged confusion of aims. At the first of a

series of public seminars under the theme “Is it time for an

Educational Audit?” he stated: “We must keep in mind the fact that

society is not made by schools: schools reflect society and are

effective to the extent that they reinforce the values of society. If

society places multiple demands upon schools such that all cannot be

met, then the purpose of school loses definition and schools appear

to become ineffective”. Early in 1982 the NSW Director-General of

Education, Doug Swan, was more forthright, complaining of “the

forces for diversity”, a “truly motley horde” of special interest

groups trying to impose their often contradictory programmes on the

schools.iii

In August 1979 the Victorian Minister for Education publically

asked “What is the aim of our school system? What is the Education

Department and its teachers trying to do?” He appointed a

Alan Barcan

4

Consultative Committee to find out, but the 477 submissions it

received reflected “the diversity of views held in the community”.

The Minister presented a statement on the matter to parliament in

December.iv Similar enquiries went on in the other states, with

limited results. Only the Curriculum Development Centre in

Canberra, a stronghold of neo-progressive ideas, found “a wide

measure of agreement within the community about the aims of

schooling”.v

In fact, confusion in the curriculum was encouraged by the wide

range of special interest groups, some with a cluster of objectives,

some of them focussed on one major programme. They included

teachers‟ unions, feminists, ethnic groups, Aboriginal groups,

environmentalists, peace activists, representatives of the

handicapped, the talented, and homosexuals, together with the

persistently-intervening media. Unlike the newer interest groups,

teachers‟ unions sometimes took a broader view of education. In

1983 a NSW Teachers‟ Federation research officer warned of the

danger to the curriculum if, alongside basic subjects like English,

mathematics, science, history, geography art, and music, were added

all the new “studies” – peace studies, women‟s studies, computer

education, media studies, career education, living skills, politics,

environmental studies, legal studies, technics, Aboriginal studies,

consumer education, multicultural studies and the rest. Such a

proliferation would create numerous one or two hour units.vi

While official statements of the aims of education had become

insecure, an alternative guide to the underlying aims or philosophy

of education might be provided by the actual curriculum.

The Curriculum: New Lamps for Old

In 1991 the South Australian Associate Director-General of

Education. Garth Boomer, described the development of the

curriculum over the previous thirty years as a case of “systemic

schizophrenia in which official curriculum statements and actual

curriculum practice in schools have become progressively more

incongruent”.vii


5

The 1970s and 1980s produced new methods of teaching and new

attitudes to learning, especially in primary and junior secondary

teaching. A melange of integrated studies (favoured by progressives)

and radical re-interpretations of old subjects (favoured by neo-

Marxists) existed alongside remnants of the liberal disciplines and

curricula which now focussed on process rather than mastery of

content. Rote learning and acquisition of facts fell into disfavour.

Instruction in the writing of compositions or essays was

disappearing. A new popularity for activity methods reduced the

intensity of learning. Teachers were encouraged to promote pupil

research and problem-solving, which often deteriorated into

answering a string of questions and copying paragraphs from books.

Formulation of concepts was accorded special value. Subject matter

was often organised into disconnected themes.

In the late 1980s a lecturer in a Catholic teachers‟ college reflected

on the succession of fashions which for brief periods attracted

exponents of both “traditional” and “progressive” curricula:

There is something of a boom or bust phenomenon in educational fashions. Exciting new things tend to come and go. Many of us can remember the advent of SRA Laboratories. Shrewdly marketed, attractively packaged, these products were eagerly bought by schools with money to spend in the halycon days of generous government grants. Kids loved coloured pencils to fill in the little boxes in their record sheets as they covered tiny reading assignments followed by in depth questions printed on brightly coloured cards . . . Remember cuisenaire rods! These coloured shapes were found in infant grades where kids no longer did Maths but rather Cuisenaire. The clatter of wooden pieces was an essential feature of busy morning work in the infant grades of the ‟60s and „70s. Cuisenaire rods may not be extinct but the boom has passed . . . The 1980s may well be remembered as the age of Process Writing. In trendy classrooms, kids exercise power and control as they take responsibility for their writing in communities, they conference and edit and publish while teachers receive their products. However there are signs that the age of Process Writing is nearing its end . . .

viii

Alan Barcan

6

The dissolution of the humanist curriculum saw the arrival of the

New English and the New History. In English traditional approaches

to both language and literature were jettisoned. A wave of

progressive education in the early 1950s had encouraged many

teachers to abandon the use of phonics in teaching reading; the word

recognition (look-and-say) method spread. For many less able

children this system was ineffective. In the 1960s most Australian

schools abandoned formal grammar. The New South Wales 1974

Curriculum for Primary Schools: Language had stated that “as

language learning is an on-going process for the child, the notion of

correctness is too narrow a focus for the evaluation of the child‟s

language growth”.ix

In 1974 S. J. Scott, senior lecturer in French at Melbourne

University, warned that both the literary content and linguistic focus

of English were threatened. “Forced at present into various protean

guises from politics and sex instruction to social surveys and film-

making, English is in greater danger than most school subjects of

losing its true identity. In an age . . . preoccupied with problems of

communication, we dare to discourage the classroom analysis of

English and so fail to highlight its characteristic properties as an

instrument of communication”.x

Garth Boomer, then Principal Education Officer of the South

Australian Department of Education, agreed that secondary school

English had almost lost its identity. Some teachers, he said in 1976,

tried to follow old paths, only to find them irrelevant. Others had

abandoned literature for “creative writing”; or encouraged reading to

the exclusion of drama; or themes to the detriment of poetry. In the

senior secondary school, where the university retained some

influence, remnants of the old curriculum still survived – “a quaint

vestigial tail on an exotic modern hybrid”.xi The emphasis had

shifted to the study of contemporary literature.

History, another bastion of liberal humanism, deteriorated more

slowly. True, it had been replaced by social studies in primary

schools across Australia in the early 1950s. But because, unlike


7

English, not all secondary students took history, it retained much of

its basic character. History and geography teachers were strong

enough to repel attempts in the early 1970s to promote social science

as an alternative to their subjects. Yet history was losing ground. In

1967 Modern History had been fourth in popularity at the NSW

Higher School Certificate, with 57 per cent of the candidature,

surpassed only by English, Mathematics and Science. By 1977 it had

fallen to seventh position, taken by 13,822 candidates, 39 per cent of

the total. In an effort to attract more support, extra options were

introduced – World History, Revolutions, Asian History and

Australian History. The decline continued.

In 1988 Professor Graeme Davison of Monash described the new

history of the late 1970s.

Unlike the old history as story approach, the new textbooks were broken into short goblets of text broken up by pictures, cartoons, maps, diagrams, and time-lines. Passages of authorial narrative are interspersed with real or even made-up documents, questions, 'things to make and do' . . . The enquiry method, with its short paragraphs and abundant questions, embraces a pedagogy arguably more appropriate to the children of the television age with their insatiable need for visual stimulus and their short attention spans.

xii

The rising retention rate during the 1980s brought changes to the

Years 11-12 population, including a stronger interest in vocational

subjects, and a lower standard of achievement. For Australia as a

whole retention rates to Year 12 jumped from 35 per cent in 1981 to

60 per cent by 1989. The proportion of females now exceeded that

of males. External examinations survived only at the end of the

secondary school; indeed, Queensland and the A.C.T. had no

concluding exams. The external exam meant that a prescribed

syllabus existed for at least some subjects. However, the external

Year 12 exams were diluted in several ways. In many states a

school-assessed component had been introduced, either within the

external examination or alongside it.xiii

Secondly, the results were

adjusted to ensure a predetermined spread, under the process known

as “norm-referencing” or standardised scoring. Normative

assessment measured the performance by a scale of marks, or even

Alan Barcan

8

grades; it was a ranking based on what examiners perceived as the

candidate‟s place on a fixed scale.xiv

Criterion-referenced assessment

asked whether students had reached certain goals; there was no

question of ranking the candidates. Some critics felt this did not

cater adequately for struggling or gifted students.xv

But complaints

were also made about norm-based assessment. After the markers

submitted their results the scores were adjusted to give whatever

distribution was required. As the Academic Committee of Flinders

University of South Australia put it colourfully: “If all the teachers

of Matriculation Chemistry in 1980 had determined to teach

Astrology instead of the prescribed syllabus, the standardisation of

scores would have produced precisely the same distribution as if the

teachers had adhered to the syllabus”.xvi

In Victoria the examiners

decided that from 1984 at least 80 per cent of HSC candidates

should gain Grade D or higher. At the same time they criticised their

limited vocabulary, imprecise use of words, inaccurate spelling,

faulty grammar, and confused punctuation.xvii

An underlying factor

here was the changing character of senior students.

One response to these changes was a drift in enrolments from state

to non-state schools which started in the late 1970s. To some extent

this represented a flight by the middle class from state secondary

schools. The proportionate shift varied somewhat from region to

region. Between 1979 and 1989 the proportion of students in non-

government schools on the A.C.T. rose from 28.4 per cent to 33.6

per cent; in Victoria from 25.6 per cent to 32.8 per cent; in

Queensland from 21.4 per cent to 24.6 per cent; in New South Wales

from 21.0 per cent to 27.5 per cent; in the Northern Territory from

14.7 per cent to 18.8 per cent; in Western Australia from 18.1 per

cent to 24.1 per cent; in Tasmania from 16.5 per cent to 22.1 per

cent; and in South Australia from 15.1 per cent to 23.3 per cent. The

proportionate strength of the swings is significant. In Victoria non-

government schools jumped 7.2 percentage points and in South

Australia 8.2 points. These states (with the ACT) had seen the

greatest inroads of radical and neo-progressive education in the late

1960s and early 1970s. The ACT shift of 5.2 percentage points had

minimal significance, as here the strength of the middle class


9

ensured that students would make progress under almost any system.

The smallest shift, 3.2, was in Queensland, whose education system

was very traditional. For the record, the other shifts were 6.5% in

NSW, 6.0 in WA, 5.6 in Tasmania; and 4.1% in the NT.xviii

Increased Interest in Vocational Education

Throughout the 1980s students, parents and employers became more

interested in vocational studies and training. High youth

unemployment, a severe decline in unskilled jobs, an increasing

proportion of women in employment, and the changing nature of

work in response to new technology encouraged a swing to studies

with some relationship (real or apparent) to employment. A by-

product of youth unemployment was rising retention rates, while the

growth of female employment fostered a marked increase in the

proportion of the girls staying on. For Australia as a whole the

retention rate to Year 12 had remained steady from 1975 to 1982, at

about 35 per cent. In the late 1980s the persistence rate increased. In

1987 it was 53 per cent. The rising retention rate produced a growth

in the proportion of students lacking strong academic interests. They

were more likely to show some interest in vocational studies.

How successful were schools at vocational preparation? Throughout

the twentieth century academic high schools played an important

preparatory role for the professions. But despite the creation of

junior technical and domestic science schools in the 1920s their

contribution to the commercial and technical vocations was unclear.

Apprenticeships, practical experience in factories, businesses,

hospitals and the like were more relevant. Surveying the

effectiveness of NSW schools from about 1920 to 1960 in preparing

youngsters for work, Allyson Holbrook of Newcastle University

concluded that of all the possible conduits connecting education and

business and industry “the long-standing and successful educational

activities within enterprises provide the key – complemented by the

broader school curriculum, not the other way round”.xix

In the mid-1950s New South Wales, Western Australia and

Tasmania converted their junior technical and home science schools

Alan Barcan

10

into comprehensive high schools. Victoria and South Australia

retained separate technical and academic highs. In all states except

New South Wales specifically vocational subjects survived for a

while, but gradually the boundaries became blurred. In some cases

the social aspects of vocational subjects were emphasised, especially

for lower ability students, who were offered courses like

mathematics in society or science in society.

In 1981 a Senate Standing Committee on Education and the Arts

report, Preparation for the workforce. Inquiry into the effectiveness

of Australian schools in preparing young people for the workforce

with particular emphasis on literacy and numeracy, stated that

schools did not appreciate the educational needs of industry or

commerce. It estimated that 20 to 25 per cent of school leavers

lacked the fundaments of literacy and numeracy. This deficiency

originated in the early primary schools and handicapped subsequent

secondary education. It attributed declining standards in the primary

school to changes in the composition of the teaching profession. The

proportion of male primary school teachers had fallen remarkably

and the average age of teachers had also fallen. While women could

teach many subjects adequately, their lack of mathematical skills led

to inadequate teaching of mathematics. It suggested that many

primary teachers lacked the techniques for teaching reading and

neglected reading and writing skills in other lessons.xx

Work experience courses were introduced, especially for the

academic adolescents. Links between TAFE (Technical and Further

Education) courses and schools grew. In Western Australia a 1984

Department of Education document, Link Courses and Integrated

Programmes: Guidelines for TAFE Colleges and Secondary School

Staffs, warned against restricting such courses to the less academic.

“The full range of students‟ scholastic abilities should be catered for

in the provision of link courses and should not be limited to any

particular student group”. TAFE administrators also expressed

concern. “We seem to be getting the lower strain of student. TAFE

courses are supposed to be open to all students . . . In courses like

Secretarial Studies, the students need to be fairly competent in


11

English, while in Bookkeeping they need Maths”. They needed to

have the Higher School Certificate.xxi

In 1987, 156 Queensland State High Schools and Special Schools

were involved in co-operative programmes, as were all 26 Colleges

of TAFE. Altogether, co-operative programmes provided 276,000

student contact hours. Link courses introduced students to TAFE and

to a range of occupations, but were not recognised as TAFE

subjects. Integrated courses were for students beyond the

compulsory age and involved formal enrolment in both the school

and the TAFE College.xxii

Some left-wing teachers resented vocational education. As a high

school teacher at Wyong, New South Wales, put it in July 1987:

“We are not preparing kids for employment. We are presenting them

with a whole range of experiences to prepare them for life after

school. It is the role of industry to prepare their employees”.xxiii

Social Factors Corroding Education

Apart from multiculturalism, other social factors were impeding

quality education. The rising figures for employment and the decline

in unemployment, reflected a booming economy, presumably

needing skilled workers; but other figures showed primary and

secondary industry declining, industrial services stable and the

largest sector, “other services” (finance and business, public

administration, community, recreation and entertainment), rising

from 29.7 per cent in 1971 to 41.4 per cent in 1986.xxiv

The actual curriculum, what was actually taught, varied from school

to school, but was heavily influenced by two factors: the attitudes of

pupils and their parents (both shaped by the social conditions of their

lives), and the skills, knowledge and outlook (i.e. the quality) of the

teachers. A school-based curriculum still prevailed in many primary

and junior secondary classes. The traumatic social conditions of the

second half of the 20th century imposed severe constraints on what

the schools could achieve. As observers frequently pointed out, “the

weaknesses of many of our basic social institutions” meant that

Alan Barcan

12

many schools “are being asked to take on many developmental tasks

that were the responsibility of the family, the community, the church

and the employer”.xxv

From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s Australia‟s sole-parent

families increased by 73 per cent, from 183,000 to 316,400. (The

number of two-parent families with dependent children rose by only

4 per cent, to 1,884,400). Over the same period single-parent

families became poorer, while the proportion reliant on

Commonwealth income support rose sharply.xxvi

The ability of the

family to provide support for the education of its children, at home

or at school, was reduced by marriage breakdown, domestic

violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and unemployment. To this list

one could add child abuse and the all-pervading intellectual and

moral mediocrity of television, pop music, and video games.

Teachers faced a severe challenge in devising or adapting curricula

to suit the range of pupil abilities and motivations.

The falling birth-rate produced a fall in the proportion of the

population of school age (5 years to 15 years) between 1976 and

1986. The fall in the number born in Australia (a decline of 3.9 per

cent, 1966 to 1986) revealed a dependence on immigration, as did

the rise of 3.6 per cent of Asian-born students.

The declining ideological impact of the Churches was suggested by

the high proportion of the NSW population stating in the 1986

census that it had no religion or not answering the question, 10 per

cent in both cases.

Television exerted a strong influence. In 1986 a left-wing high

school teacher, Rowan Cahill, drew attention in the NSW Teachers‟

Federation paper to Neil Postman‟s discussion on the impact of

television on American students. According to Postman, in 1982, the

average American aged between 6 and 18 spent 16,000 hours

watching television compared to about 13,000 hours attending

school. The role of the traditional school curriculum had been

usurped by a television curriculum. This, Postman said, was image-


13

centred, did not encourage the development of analytical abilities,

was easy, nearly always entertaining, and was entirely fragmented

and discontinuous. Having no connection to what had come before

or after, having no rational order, the TV curriculum projected a

philosophy that was basically depressive, stressing discontinuity not

coherence and immediate rather than deferred gratification. The

typical school curriculum paralleled far too closely the

fragmentation found in television‟s weekly schedule.xxvii

Australian television differed from American in several respects.

Most obvious was the existence of a national network alongside the

commercial ones, offering better cultural and intellectual nutriment.

The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) also had higher intellectual

aspirations but was somewhat fragmented by its advertising and its

pluralist cultural purpose. Another difference with America was that

the deterioration in quality was slower, because the ABC used much

BBC material while the SBS often imported quality programmes

from abroad. Nevertheless, in Australia, too, television encouraged

fragmentation and short attention spans.

Cahill was concerned at the pessimism prevalent amongst

adolescents. Although he was writing on the eve of communism‟s

disintegration and the end of the Cold War, “the kids were tragically

sure that World War III was about to break out. And with it, the end

of humanity”. Television, including the vividness of television news,

was a source of this doomsday gloom, though not the only one.

Cahill cited a writer in the Australian Bookseller and Publisher: “To

judge from Australian school textbooks and a plethora of current

learning resources at all levels, present horrors mean that the future

is a distinctly unlovely prospect for many”. Cahill comments that in

an age of school-based curriculum decision-making and emphasis on

relevance, “the gloom and doomers seem to sprout around the nation

like so many poison mushrooms”.xxviii

Another socially-conditioned difficulty was discipline. Traditional

aids to discipline had disappeared. In the mid-nineteenth century

primary schools had introduced marching drill partly for discipline

Alan Barcan

14

reasons. In the late 19th century “Men discovered examinations to

be a first-class substitute for the birch”.xxix

But many external exams

disappeared in the late 1960s, while school cadet corps were

abolished in the 1980s. In Victoria a newly-elected Labor

government abolished corporal punishment in government schools

in May 1983. It was abolished in New South Wales at the end of

1985 and in Queensland in 1989. The education editor of the

Melbourne Age, Geoff Maslen, wrote on 25 April 1989: “Across

Australia, the classroom has become a daily battleground for

teachers as they try to maintain some semblance of control over

increasingly mutinous students”.xxx

Discipline problems affected methods of teaching, the type of

curriculum, and the means of assessment. In an attempt to improve

discipline, students were offered a wider choice of subject in the

junior secondary years. For the same reason, integration of subjects,

which facilitated activity work, was often introduced.

Growing discipline problems, a relative decline in salaries, and the

expansion of alternative white-collar vocations reduced the appeal of

teaching as a career; it became harder to recruit high-quality

candidates. Between 1985 and 1989 the number of students applying

for entry to tertiary institutions whose first preference was teaching

fell dramatically from 16.9 per cent to 10.3 per cent.xxxi

The feminisation of the primary teaching service advanced

inexorably. Until the early 1970s the NSW Department of Education

ensured a balance in the proportion of male and female teachers by

manipulation of teacher-training scholarships. This power

disappeared when it lost direct control of teachers‟ colleges and

abandoned the allocation of scholarships. In fact, with equal pay for

men and women and new opportunities for men outside teaching the

proportion of women primary school teachers started to rise from 56

per cent in 1960 to 66 per cent in 1970. By 1980 it had climbed to 69

per cent, by 1990 to 75 per cent. The shortage of male teachers

deprived primary schoolboys of a role model.xxxii


15

These problems were not helped by a growing inadequacy in teacher

training. In the early 1970s small state-owned specialised teachers‟

colleges were converted into large, multi-purpose, Commonwealth-

funded autonomous colleges of advanced education. University

faculties of education also extended their hold on teacher training.

The term “teacher training” was discarded in favour of “teacher

preparation” or “teacher education”, suggesting a less practical,

more theoretical approach. To save money, many training

institutions reduced the amount of practice teaching and/or the

number of demonstration lessons. Many lecturers in education

promulgated politically and socially radical interpretations of the

nature of teaching and of the curriculum.

The Commonwealth’s New-Style Managerialism

In the 1980s the Commonwealth responded to new currents

favouring neo-liberal policies. At the Commonwealth level but also

in the states and territories new methods of implementing education

policies were appearing. The essence was a type of corporate

managerialism at senior level of education departments and more

direct control by politicians, notably the ministers for education and

even the premiers or prime ministers.xxxiii

A late arrival in school education, the Commonwealth had

established a Department of Education and Science under a Minister

in December 1966, but controlled no schools. The Commonwealth

gave financial aid to universities and non-state schools and grants for

secondary school libraries and science. The Whitlam Labor

government (1972-75) established the Australian Schools

Commission to recommend financial grants to Australian schools

and to provide reports on primary and secondary schooling. It was a

strong advocate of progressive education. Whitlam Labor also

established a Curriculum Development Centre, in 1975 with

Malcolm Skilbeck, a supporter of progressive education, as director.

Its first and substantial project was the Social Education Materials

Project in 1977, which was banned in Queensland.xxxiv

Alan Barcan

16

The Liberal-National coalition led by Malcolm Fraser walked

quietly regarding education. During the 1983 elections the Labor

leader, Bob Hawke, promised to restore the Commonwealth‟s

commitment to government schools. The Fraser budget of 1976-77

had given $366 million to non-government schools and $705 million

to government schools. Thereafter the non-government allocation

rose steadily, the government allocation usually fell. To increase the

funding of government schools Hawke planned to reduce its

allocation to non-government ones, but the strong drift of enrolments

from government to non-government schools and the protests of

supporters of the non-government sector frustrated Labor‟s purpose.

All it could manage was the New Schools Policy of 1985 which

reduced the possibility of new non-government schools obtaining

Commonwealth funds.xxxv

After Hawke became prime minister in March 1983 the

Commonwealth began to implement basic elements of neo-liberal

political economy, but was somewhat slow to embrace its associated

education policies. Hawke appointed Senator Susan Ryan, a feminist

and progressive, as Minister for Education. The Commonwealth's

contribution to the cost of schools and pre-schools, state and non-

state, remained steady at about 20 per cent.xxxvi

The Australian

Schools Commission's strong commitment to progressive education

deterred quality improvement, but soon power began to shift from

the relatively autonomous Schools Commission to the

Commonwealth Department of Education.xxxvii

The Commission introduced a “Participation and Equity Program”

which lasted from July 1984 until 1987 and channelled a total of

$127,287,000 to government schools and $14,913,000 to non-

government. By 1987 around 800 schools were funded, about 40

per cent of all government schools and 20 per cent of non-

government ones. The goals of the PEP were amorphous: “to help

more young people complete a secondary education”, to foster equal

educational outcomes; and to assist “a fundamental improvement in

the quality of schooling”. The program included curriculum reform

and diversification; experiments in assessment and accreditation;


17

fostering teacher, student and parent interaction; teacher renewal and

support; school structure and organisation; and post-school

links.xxxviii

The Schools Commission‟s egalitarian ideology of “individual

empowerment” and concern for “social justice” was being

challenged by the new ideology of “economic rationalism”

supporting deregulation of the private sector and “corporate

capitalism”, the direct managerial control of individual corporations,

including schools. In August 1984 Senator Ryan cut the

Commission's staff almost by half and limited its role to advising on

policy.

In August 1984 Susan Ryan asked Professor Peter Karmel to chair a

Quality of Education Review Committee. Its terms of reference

indicated that the Commonwealth‟s generous funding should

produce higher standards in primary and secondary education and a

closer relationship between secondary education and employment.

The Committee‟s report of April 1985 found no incontrovertible

evidence from either government or non-government schools that

the “cognitive outcomes” for students had become either better or

worse since the early 1970s. It noted that employer and industry

groups complained of inadequacies; education authorities saw some

improvement. Physical provision, such as school buildings, and

facilities, such as libraries, had improved. While many students had

positive attitudes to their schools, “too large a proportion feel

alienated from them and regards much of school life as without

relevance”. It would seem that another function of the Committee

was to facilitate the growth of the Commonwealth„s Department of

Education at the expense of the Schools Commission.xxxix

Towards the end of August that year Susan Ryan warned that the

government was no longer prepared to pour “buckets of money” into

the education system indiscriminately. The Commonwealth wanted

value for their dollar.xl

Alan Barcan

18

On 1 April 1987 the Commonwealth Schools Commission presented

the Minister with an unsolicited report, In The National Interest:

Secondary Education and Youth Policy in Australia. Its opening

chapter, “The Economy and Demands made on Education”, stated:

“At the heart of any review of the economic demands made on

education is the concept of skill”. It distinguished between basic or

generic skills and specific vocational skills and asserted that it was

not the task of secondary schools to provide training for specific

occupations. The Report suggested a target of a 65 per cent retention

rate to Year 12 by 1992. An unobtrusive motive was to

accommodate the 14 per cent of the 15-19 age group who were

neither in education nor training nor full-time employment. To

encourage students to stay on, the Report suggested the abolition of

external examinations. The Sydney Morning Herald found this

“typical of the muddle-headed theory the commission has been

peddling for some time”.xli

Susan Ryan assured employers that "the

Commonwealth Government had never supported the abolition of

secondary external exams" and that it recognised the desire of

business and industry groups for an easily understood credential at

the end of secondary school.xlii

The Curriculum Development Centre had been incorporated into the

Commonwealth Schools Commission in 1984, becoming the

Curriculum Development Council. It ceased to operate at the end of

1987, six months before the Schools Commission was itself

abolished.xliii

During the 1980s a new slogan began to circulate: Back to Basics.

The States and Territories Attempt Reform

In the 1980s many Departments of Education tried to reassert their

controls over the schools. But socio-political influences, in particular

resistance from the teacher unions and the special interest groups,

made this no easy task. Some state departments of education

attempted to recover their lost controls, particularly as regards the

curriculum. This was coupled, in some cases, with moves to

establish or strengthen school councils, which might serve to divert


19

pressure exerted by special interest groups from the centre to the

localities; school councils might also limit the power of radical

teachers' unions and parents' associations. But some departments

sympathised with neo-progressive or even neo-Marxist doctrines.

Politicians concerned about the new education responded by

assuming greater control over education and reducing the power of

their departments. An additional pressure for reform was financial:

the need to curb expenditure by cutting back the public service,

including the education bureaucracy.xliv

In New South Wales A. J. Buchan, Acting Director-General, issued a

document in June 1979, “Managing the School”, pointing out that

parents and employers were now demanding that teachers and

administrators account for their management of education. It

specified five documents that schools were to maintain, including

“Teaching/Learning Programs”, intended to encourage sequential

planning of lessons by teachers.

In April 1979 the Labor Party Minister for Education, Eric Bedford,

recommended to Cabinet that the internally assessed School

Certificate exam again be awarded on a partly internal/partly

external examination. Faced with Teachers‟ Federation opposition,

parliament appointed a committee, chaired by Brian McGowan, a

former primary and secondary teacher, to report on the School

Certificate. The report of May 1981 suggested broad changes in the

junior secondary school anticipated some introduced ten years later:

a school year of two semesters, schools to publish details of their

courses, dezoning to give parents a choice of schools, students not

up to standard to be failed. This, too, was blocked by the Teachers'

Federation. The Federation also blocked an attempt to introduce

school councils in 1983-84. The Minister asked the Director-

General, Doug Swan, and the former chairman of the

Commonwealth Schools Commission, Ken McKinnon, to ascertain

the views of major interest groups. The outcome was Future

Directions of Secondary Education: A Report in June 1984. This

was a cautious document whose main contribution was to sow the

seeds for later changes.xlv

Alan Barcan

20

A new minister, Rod Cavalier, took office in April 1984. He told

parliament he would preserve the remaining selective state high

schools (bastions of academic subjects). He told the Teachers'

Federation that they had lost their privileged relationship; the

Department of Education, he said, could not be run on an ad hoc

basis, solving particular issues raised from time to time by the

Federation. A stronger version of “Managing the School” was issued

in October 1984, requiring each school to “develop policies and

programs relating to curriculum which are consistent with

departmental curriculum statements”.xlvi

Cavalier favoured traditional approaches. “Our students must have a

solid grounding”, he said in 1987. “If there is a problem with gaining

children‟s attention, if there is a problem with discipline, the last

solution is in mickey mousing the curriculum”.xlvii

The Education

and Public Instruction Act of 1987, which repealed the 1880 Public

Instruction Act, established a new Board of Secondary Education

with responsibilities covering Years 7 to 12, thus restoring some

external scrutiny over the junior secondary years. Nick Greiner,

Liberal Party leader of the Opposition, expressed his admiration.

“Mr Cavalier is a Minister of very great diligence. He has a great

deal of enthusiasm and a great deal of concern for maintaining the

quality of education”.xlviii

But when Greiner formed his own

government after the March 1988 elections his Minister for

Education, Terry Metherell introduced legislation which went far

beyond anything Cavalier had done.

In 1980 Victoria seemed about to anticipate reforms implemented

ten years later in New South Wales, Tasmania and elsewhere. But its

genesis was protracted and confused. During the cultural revolution

of 1967-74 Victoria had gone farther than any other Australian state

in transferring control of the curriculum to the schools, which at the

secondary level largely meant the Victorian Secondary Teachers'

Association. The VSTA exercised tremendous influence on

educational policy and the Department of Education had lost most of

its power. Victoria had only three selective government high

schools: Melbourne High School, MacRobertson Girls' High School,


21

and University High School. Their intake started at Form 3 (later

known as Year 9) when students were aged 13 or 14. From 1972

University High School became a local high school with Form 1

(Year 7) entry. The school retained selective entry for its music and

accelerated learning (Gifted Students) programs.

Following the re-election of the Liberal government in May 1979 the

new Minister, Alan Hunt, launched extensive organisational

changes, outlined in the December 1980 White Paper on Strategies

and Structures which promised devolution, increased participation

by parents, the community and teachers, and a core curriculum. As

later in New South Wales, these changes were introduced at a rapid

rate. Hunt established a Corporate Management Group headed by

the Minister and the Department and its Director-General lost much

of their authority.xlix

But the 1982-84 recession brought Labor to

power in April 1982, ending 27 years of Liberal rule. The new

Minister, Robert Fordham, redirected the reform movement. The

three teacher unions and two parent organisations which had helped

Labor gain power expected a share of the spoils. The State Board of

Education, set up as an independent body in 1983, became an

advocate of progressive and radical education.l In February 1984 the

Education Act was amended to give school councils the power to

decide educational policies for their schools; radical teachers and

parents dominated many school councils.

The recession was fading, but Labor was re-elected, with a reduced

majority, in March 1985: the first time Victorian Labor had ever

achieved a successive term. Ian Cathie, a former teacher, became

Minister for Education. In November he announced that a Ministry

of Education would be formed which would include the Department

of Education. But the former Department, now known as the Schools

Division, dominated this Ministry. Cathie appointed a Ministry

Structures Project Team, which published a discussion paper, Taking

the Schools into the 1990s, in June 1986 and a Ministry Structures

Project Team Report four months later. The Report was

contradictory. It recommended expanding the powers of school

councils to include the selection of principals, appointment of

Alan Barcan

22

teachers and development of curricula. Coupled with this was a

reduction in the number of regional centres, thus giving more control

to the central Ministry. But who would control the school councils

and who would control the Ministry? The Report‟s requirement of

“equality of outcomes for students” challenged the self-governing

autonomy of schools. The strong opposition of the teachers' unions

and parents' associations to the proposed restructuring forced the

Minister to give ground. Indeed, the VSTA‟s hostility ensured that

Cathie was replaced in December 1987 by Caroline Hogg, who was

supposed to heal the policy disputes. Her reign was brief. Joan

Kirner became education minister after the elections of October

1988.li

Between 1980 and 1990 eight ministers attempted to restructure the

government's largest portfolio, Education. It suffered five

restructures and Joan Kirner's extensive “fine-tuning”.

Administrative staff were demoted, relocated, promoted, reassigned

and redeployed. This entailed much waste of money, the collapse of

programs, the decline of morale, and the resignation of talented and

conscientious staff. Serious reform was blocked by the militant

teachers' unions, whose leading members used the expanding

bureaucracy as an avenue for career advancement.lii

In the meantime, the senior years of secondary school were under

pressure. In 1983 Fordham had commissioned a Ministerial Review

of Postcompulsory Schooling with Jean Blackburn, ex-communist,

feminist, and supporter of progressive education, as chairwoman of a

committee of seven. Its report, presented to Cathie in March 1985,

took as its basic premise that the upper secondary level courses,

originally designed for a minority, were now unsuited to the wider

range of ability of students in these years. Between 1981 and 1984

the retention rate to Year 11 in Victorian government schools had

risen from 63 per cent to 73 per cent, and to Year 12 from 24 per

cent to 34 per cent. In non-government schools the rates had risen in

Year 11 from 88 per cent to 93 per cent and in Year 12 from 70 per

cent to 79 per cent.liii


23

The Report recommended that the Higher School Certificate, which

offered three specialised Year 12 certificates, be replaced by a

Victorian Certificate of Education. This was finally introduced in

1991, after years of agonising debate. The Report had said that

whereas the Higher School Certificate had compared the

achievement of students to determine their fitness for higher

education, the VCE would record achievements over a wide range of

subjects, many of which (such as dance and drama) could not be

assessed in the traditional way. Organisation of the curriculum into

semester units would afford greater flexibility in choice – over the

two years students would take 24 units rather than 11 subjects.liv

But

to provide for a wide range of abilities in the one Certificate was an

extremely difficult task. Common Assessment Tasks were

introduced into all Year 12 courses; they were to be “reported”

(rather than graded) by teachers on an A-E scale. The universities

objected to the lowering of standards; the Victorian Secondary

Teachers Association opposed the elitism of academic studies.

Parents' associations supported the unions.

The election of Jeff Kennett at the head a Liberal-National coalition

government in October 1992 marked the resurrection of the “Radical

Right” reforms launched by Hunt in 1980.

In South Australia the task of establishing the new political controls

was also difficult. In this state, as in Victoria, progressive and radical

education had made great inroads. Between September 1979 and

November 1982 a Liberal Party government momentarily

interrupted Labor‟s hegemony; attempts at reform started. In 1981

the Education Department report Into the '80s: Our Schools and

their Purposes sought to reassert Departmental control over the

fragmented curriculum while fostering local autonomy.lv A

committee chaired by J. P. Keeves, Director of the ACER was

appointed to enquire into education. Its Final Report (1982) on

Education and Change in South Australia criticised both Into the

‘80s and the Commonwealth Curriculum Development Centre‟s

Core Curriculum for Australian Schools, published in 1980. “They

touch on certain curricular issues at such a level of generality that an

Alan Barcan

24

individual school or teacher could justify the choice of almost any

aspect of curriculum policy or practice by reference to either or both

documents”. The Report also argued that “school based curriculum

planning and development cannot be made effective because the

teachers in the schools have neither the time and the resources, nor

the necessary expertise to undertake what they have learnt to be

difficult and time-consuming tasks”. Yet the Keeves discussion of

local versus central control was highly ambiguous.lvi

In July 1982 cabinet approved a proposal by the Director-General to

reorganise the education administration. This included reforming the

very large but ineffective Curriculum Directorate and creating an

Evaluation Review Unit with considerable independence to

scrutinise teaching, curriculum and administration.

As in Victoria, when Labor regained office (November 1982) reform

changed direction. The original scheme was abandoned in favour of

administrative decentralisation, greater powers to local schools and a

small Central Office, with two directorates responsible for

curriculum and resources. The Curriculum Directorate, operating

with fewer officers, was to develop primary and secondary school

curriculum policies to Year 12. The restructuring absorbed

Departmental energies from 1983 to 1985. As in Victoria, the new

system brought much reclassification, retirement and relocation of

officers. The Office of the Minister (as distinct from the

Department) increased in size. A subsequent report of the

parliamentary Public Accounts Committee on The 1983-86

Reorganisation of the Education Department complained that it was

difficult to assess whether “imprecisely stated goals” were achieved;

whether the reorganisation had saved money or increased costs; and

whether out-of-school resources had been reduced.lvii

A “School Development Plan” of 1987 aimed to give schools new

responsibilities in self-management. Financial problems produced a

reduction in the number of senior officers in the Department. The

teachers‟ union, the South Australian Institute of Teachers, was

dubious about devolution, fearing it might reduce resources for


25

schools, make the principal a manager first and an educator second,

and “shift blame to schools”.lviii

In Western Australia Peter Jones, Liberal Party Minister for

Education 1975-1979, was the first activist occupant of that office

for decades. Concerned that his Department‟s head office had grown

to 1000 members and was paying too much attention to policy rather

than administration, he organised a restructuring in 1979. Despite

this, central staff providing support services to schools continued to

increase. The Burke Labor government which came to power in

February 1983 found it necessary to undertake cost cutting; the

highly centralised department of education seemed an obvious

target.lix

Bob Pearce, a former teacher, was minister for education from 1983

till 1988. The new government appointed a “Committee of Inquiry

into Education in Western Australia” on which Education

Department bureaucrats were strongly represented. The Beazley

Report of 1984 was an unwieldy and wide-ranging document,

focusing on liberal-progressive ideas coupled with Labor‟s concern

for disadvantaged “minority” groups. Its outcome was limited to

reducing university power over the secondary curriculum.lx

The State School Teachers Union had considerable influence over

education policy, but this collaboration with the minister ended after

a change of leadership in the Union in 1985. In September 1986 the

Director-General, Bob Vickery, retired two and a half years before

his term expired. His successor, given the new title of Chief

Executive Officer, had diminished power.lxi

Burke‟s White Paper, Managing Change in the Public Sector (1986)

outlined new administrative principles in government agencies.

These included the need for efficiency and economy and increased

ministerial control over their departments. The Functional Review

Committee of the WA government (August 1986) applied these

principles to the Education portfolio. The culmination of the new

order was the Better Schools in Western Australia report of 1987.

Alan Barcan

26

However, at the same time the education administration used the

Beazley Report as an excuse to introduce a new progressive

education policy, a unitised curriculum.

Tasmania showed little interest in educational change. Brian

Caldwell, co-author of The Self-managing School (1988) and a

senior lecturer in Educational Administration at the University of

Tasmania, described the 1980s as an era of tranquillity in Tasmanian

education. “From a schools‟ perspective, Tasmania began the decade

with a higher level of decentralised decision-making in resource

allocation than any other state, with evolutionary development

towards self-management in succeeding years”.lxii

This was

something Caldwell himself had advocated. A White Paper on

Tasmanian Schools and Colleges (May 1981) had urged that all

schools and colleges establish school councils by 1985, but progress

was minimal. Labor lost government in May 1982 to the Liberals,

who retained power until June 1989. In 1984, despite opposition

from the Tasmanian Teachers' Federation, a Liberal minister

extended the literacy and numeracy tests for 10 and 14 year-old

children in government schools. Up till then these tests, a unique

feature of Tasmanian education from 1976, had been given in

alternate years; now they were applied each year.lxiii

Serious change was finally provoked in June 1990 when the critical

economic situation led the government to commission a Melbourne-

based consultancy firm Cresap to conduct a review of the

Department of Education and the Arts which was spending 23 per

cent of the State‟s recurrent expenditure.

Queensland was equally uninterested in change. Still a pioneering,

rural society, it was much less hospitable to progressive and radical

education than most other parts of Australia. The Department

retained its firm control. School councils did not exist and little

devolution of power to school principals had occurred. At the

beginning of 1978 the Queensland cabinet banned the use of two

programmes, MACOS (Man: a Course of Study) in primary schools

and SEMP (Social Education Materials Project) in high schools,


27

both of which employed progressive styles of work. The first was

an American programme, the second was produced by the

Curriculum Development Centre, Canberra. In April 1978 premier

Bjelke-Petersen appointed a parliamentary Select Committee to

consider Queensland education. The Ahern Committee of 1978 to

1980 submitted six Interim Reports and a Final Report. The

Committee was intended to placate various interest groups seeking

policy changes; few of its recommendations were acted upon.

During the 1980s the Department was concerned mainly with

administrative restructuring. During 1984-86 five reports were

submitted on various aspects of Queensland education. Little real

change occurred.lxiv

In the Australian Capital Territory, as in Victoria, a strong middle-

class and a militant teachers' union provided a favourable

environment for progressive education. Public education was

controlled by an autonomous statutory authority, the ACT Schools

Council. The teachers' union, parents' association, community

groups and students were represented on this Council, ensuring a

favourable environment for progressive and radical education.

Control of the curriculum was handed over to the schools. In the

1980s pressure for reform came not from the administration but from

parents, newspapers and private organisations, including the small

but active Professional Association of Classroom Teachers.

Complaints about the quality of education in the high schools

(catering for Years 7 to 10) produced the 1983 Steinle Report: The

Challenge of Change. A Review of High Schools in the ACT. It was

scathingly criticised in The Canberra Times as

the latest in the endless stream of reports, reviews, discussion papers, agendas and working-party reports generated by the ACT secondary schools system and the bureaucrats who sit on top of it . . . The report is symptomatic of a sick system. It is precisely the sort of document that might have been expected from one group of “educationists” invited by another group of “educationists” to sit in judgement upon them and their works.

lxv

Attempts were made to restore direction to the curriculum. In 1984-

85 the Schools Authority produced non-prescriptive curriculum

Alan Barcan

28

guidelines in two curriculum areas, with little result. In late 1988 the

Authority decided to produce “frameworks” for each curriculum

area in the junior secondary school. The 1987 Management Review

of the ACT Schools Authority (Berkeley Report) contributed to the

development of a more conventional ministerial structure with an

administrative hierarchy when the ACT became self-governing in

1989.lxvi

The Northern Territory lacked a middle class sympathetic to

progressive education. It was a pioneering, sparsely-settled frontier

society, which would normally favour formal pedagogy. But South

Australia, which administered the Northern Territory school system

until 1975, planted the seeds of progressive education, which were

watered by Commonwealth funds. Canberra held formal

responsibility during 1975-1979 but its bureaucrats, lacking

experience in running an educational system, “were inclined to

accept the advice of the idealistic professionals”, who were

accountable to Canberra, not the local community.lxvii

Two South

Australians, John Steinle and Hedley Beare, fostered progressive

fashions. The government education system, as a NT Department of

Education officer put it, was “unencumbered by the baggage of

tradition, entrenched bureaucracy and a self-perpetuating teacher

cadre which had gone to school in the system, taught in the system

and eventually risen to manage the system”.lxviii

The teachers had

considerable freedom in the schools and little central supervision.

But in 1978 the Northern Territory gained self-government, a

Country Liberal Party began an apparently perpetual term in office,

and the government set about reining in the freedoms of progressive

pedagogues. The initial secretary of the new NT Education

Department, Dr J. Eedle, warned that the Department would not

allow schools to “drift away into independent school republics

accountable only to a handful of incompletely representative school

councillors”.lxix

In 1980 Education absorbed about 40 per cent of the NT budget and

one-third of its public servants. Because of this, the Chief Minister


29

placed education in the public sphere rather than creating an

autonomous authority, as in the ACT. The Minister for Education

circumscribed the autonomy of the teaching service by delegating

powers to the Secretary of the Department of Education. In 1983

school councils were set up, with chairmen or women who were

non-education staff and with a direct line of communication to the

Minister, by-passing the Education Department and the school

principal. But in practice principals and teachers on school councils

were often able to persuade parents and community members to take

their side.lxx

Thus it was possible for the teachers at Sanderson High

School, Darwin, to introduce in 1985 a unitised curriculum. This

arranged courses into ten-week packages with vertical grouping of

pupils (i.e. mixed age groups). Students selected their units once a

quarter, while meeting certain pre-requisites. Soon other schools

imitated this.lxxi

Yet in general the Northern Territory, like Queensland, managed to

restrain the enthusiasms of the new education even before a new

wave of reform started in 1987.

Sources of Reform

Some of the reforms attempted in the 1980s sprang from the need for

financial economy. Many were related to the new concept of

administrative organisation. While some Education Departments

sought to restore the authority over public schools they had lost in

the late 1960s and early 1970s, the dominant trend was the efforts of

ministers or premiers, and sometimes their equivalents at the

Commonwealth level, to replace departmental control with political

control. In some states efforts weakening departmental authority

involved strengthening school councils. The need to reduce costs

provided an impetus to reduce the size of the public service,

including the education administrative bureaucracy.

Yet progressive education retained a grip. It provided a rationale for

the non-educational situation in some state schools. State secondary

schools, in particular, were finding it difficult to maintain a liberal

academic curriculum and formal teaching methods. It could be

Alan Barcan

30

argued that progressive education was not a cause but a consequence

of educational deterioration. Moreover, many university and college

of advanced education lecturers in teacher education continued to

advocate progressive and radical pedagogy to their students. A

third influence, in the early 1980s, was the Commonwealth Schools

Commission‟s support, backed by financial resources, for

progressive education. But as we have noted, the tide was changing.

Discontent with the curriculum and standards persisted. Greg

Sheridan's series of articles in The Australian, starting on 2 February

1985 with “The lies they tell our Children”, was the strongest of

many public protests about the curriculum. In the late 1980s the

politicians, and teachers, faced the unpalatable fact that many

students – perhaps as many as 20 per cent – entered secondary

schools unable to read, write or add up effectively.lxxii

Their chances

of acquiring secondary education were thus reduced.

Not all teachers and not all schools had embraced the new education

enthusiastically. Many continued to use traditional methods and

struggled to preserve elements of the traditional curriculum. Some

teachers experimented with the new methods but later reverted to the

old. However, as the years passed such teachers became fewer as

resignation, retirement, acceptance of fashion and death reduced

their numbers.

Initial efforts at reform faced for four major obstacles: (1)

Departments of Education lacked sanctions to enforce their proposed

reforms. They had little control over the education and training of

future teachers, no effective system of inspection, no effective form

of external examination; (2) the leadership of the teachers' unions

and parents' associations usually opposed reform. They feared that

school councils would undermine their centralised structures and

power; (3) the Departments contained many “professional

educationists” who sympathised with the progressive pedagogy; (4)

some teachers adopted informal methods as a solution to dealing

with recalcitrant students.


31

Torn between the pressures of conflicting interest groups, the

Departments resorted to issuing a flood of documents – statement

after statement, report after report. But some ministers for education

began to intervene; the politicisation of education was under way.

Yet the drift in the late 1970s from government to non-government

schools necessitated political intervention. So did the complaints of

parents about poor standards and uncertain values. So, too, did the

demands of employers for a greater emphasis on vocational skills.

The politicisation of education control provided the key to changing

the public schools. Certain features of neo-liberal education, such as

greater central control of the curriculum, the encouragement of a

vocational emphasis, and devolution of responsibilities to the

individual schools, weakened and dispersed the influence of the

special interest groups.

Different states faced different challenges. Victoria seemed about to

take the lead at the beginning of the decade when a Liberal

government attempted to re-establish authority over schools. This

was interrupted by the election of a Labor government. Yet when in

due course the Labor Party Minister for Education also attempted

modifications he, too, was frustrated by radical and progressive

teachers. In New South Wales, somewhat more conservative

educationally, the urgency was less pressing. Yet as early as 1984,

after the Labor Party‟s Rod Cavalier became minister for education,

the Sydney Morning Herald discerned “a basic shift in the power

politics of education”.lxxiii

At the end of the 1980s the Liberal Party‟s

Terry Metherell carried through the most extreme restructuring in

Australia. Few remedial measures were attempted in South

Australia, which in the late 60s and early 70s had matched Victoria

in its enthusiasm for progressive education. Change arrived in

Western Australia in the late 1980s. Reform in Tasmania came very

late, finally forced by economic pressures. Queensland seemed

immune to reform.

During the 1980s Australia began to enter a new, globalised

economy. The Commonwealth shared New South Wales‟

Alan Barcan

32

commitment to the application of “economic rationalism” and neo-

liberal policies to education. The main demonstration of this was the

shift in power from the Australian Schools Commission, which

favoured progressive education, to the Minister and the

Commonwealth Department of Education. It lost most of its

functions in November 1985 and disappeared when the Department

of Employment, Education and Training was formed in July 1987.

The new era was formally announced when John Dawkins,

Commonwealth Minister for Employment, Education and A. C.

Holding, Minister for Employment Services and Youth Affairs

issued a document titled Skills for Australia: “The Government is

determined that our education and training system should play an

active role in responding to the major economic challenges now

facing Australia”.lxxiv

References

i Brian Jacka, Directions in Primary Education, 1974, p. 119 and

elsewhere; R. T. Fitzgerald, J. K. Matthews, and P. P. Thomson, Alternative Education, 1974, espec. pp. 9, 17.

ii John Hughes with Paul Brock, Reform and Resistance in NSW

Public Education: Six Attempts at Major Reform, 1905-1995, 2008, p. 87; Sydney Morning Herald, 14 October 1977.

iii H.E. Bedford, Minister for Education, Introductory Address, “Is it

Time for an Educational Audit?”, Public Seminar, Sydney, 22 April 1978, p. 10; Doug Swann, 6 January 1982, in Priorities in Education, NSW Conference of Primary School Administrators, Glenfield, 1983, p. 5

iv “Ministerial Statement on Aims and Objectives of Education”,

Education Gazette, Melbourne, 13 February 1980. v Curriculum Development Centre, Core Curriculum for Australian

Schools, June 1980. vi Anne Junor, “Qualitative change”, Education, 7 November 1983.

vii Garth Boomer, Associate Director-General of Education

(Curriculum), in “Curriculum and Teaching in Australian Schools, 1960-1990: A Tale of Two Epistemologies”, in Bill Green (ed.), Designs on Learning: Essays on Curriculum and


33

Teaching by Garth Boomer, Australian Curriculum Studies Association, Canberra, 1999, p. 127.

viii Frank Nolan, “The Demise of Process Writing”, Australian

Journal of Reading, Vol. 11,No. 3, August 1988. ix A. Barcan, Social Science, History and the New Curriculum

(1971), pp. 96-9; Barcan, Two Centuries of Education in New South Wales, pp. 287-288.

x S.J. Scott, “English is a Language Too!”, Aces Review, Vol. 1, No.

9-10, August-September 1974. xi Garth Boomer, “Secondary English – Yesterday, Today and

Tomorrow”, in K.D. Watson and R.D. Eagleton (eds), English in Secondary Schools: Today and Tomorrow, English Teachers‟ Association of NSW, 1977, p. 11.

xii G. Davison, "Reflections on teaching Australian history",

Curriculum Australia, No. 6, 1988. xiii

Neil Baumgart and Brian Low, “A National Overview”, in Brian Low and Graeme Withers (eds), Developments in School and Public Assessment, 1990, pp. 2, 4, 8.

xiv Graeme Withers and Margaret Batten, “Defining Types of

Assessment”, in Low and Withers (eds), Developments in School and Public Assessment, pp. 22-25.

xv Withers and Batten, “Types of Assessment”, in Developments in

School and Public Assessment, pp. 29, 31. xvi

cf. G. Partington, What Do Our Children Know?: A Study of Educational Standards, Policy Paper No. 12, Australian Institute for Public Policy, 1988, pp. 27-8.

xvii Gwyn Davies, “Passing Without Credit”, Education Monitor,

Spring 1989, p. 34. xviii

G. Partington, “Why Parents are Choosing Independent Schools”, Education Monitor, Vol. 1, No.3, 1990, p. 25.

xix A. Holbrook, “Re-visiting the Connections between School, Work

and Learning in the Workplace”, History of Education Review, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2000, pp. 16-17.

xx Senate Standing Committee on Education and the Arts,

Preparation for the Workforce, Canberra, 1981, pp. 25-27. The estimate of 10% to 20% illiteracy at the end of primary school was based on the NSW Basic Skills Test, the SA Writing and

Alan Barcan

34

Reading Assessment programme, and the ACT‟s Reading Recovery Intervention programme.

xxi David McRae, Teachers, Schools and Change, 1988, pp. 87-8.

xxii McRae, pp. 84-5.

xxiii The Sun-Herald, 26 July 1987.

xxiv School-Centred Education: Building a More Responsive State School System, Sydney, 1990, pp. 267-73.

xxv Professor Colin Power, former UNESCO director-general of

education, addressing a conference of the National Council of Independent Schools Association, Education Review, North Sydney, August/September 2000, p. 4.

xxvi Deborah Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care, 1994, p. 171.

xxvii Rowan Cahill, “Beyond Doomsday”, Education, 16 June 1986. Postman was writing in Phi Delta Kappan, January 1983 (“Engaging Students in the Great Conversation”).

xxviii Cahill refers to Peter McGregor‟s article, “The Doomsday Syndrome”, in Australian Bookseller and Publisher, March 1986.

xxix Rev. Mr Belcher, rector of the Boys‟ High School Dunedin, Proceedings, Australian Association for the Advancement of Science, Brisbane Conference, 1895.

xxx cf. A. Barcan, Sociological Theory and Educational Reality,

1993, p. 318. xxxi

The Literacy Challenge, Report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training, Dec. 1992, pp. 1-2, 24-26, 29, 31.

xxxii Government Schools of New South Wales 1848-2003, 2003, p. 218 (Appendix 5)

xxxiii Janice Dudley and Lesley Vidovich, The Politics of Education: Commonwealth Schools Policy 1973-95, 1995, pp. 35, 100.

xxxiv R. W. Connell, Reshaping Australian Education 1960-1985, 1993, pp. 459-551

xxxv Janice Dudley and Lesley Vidovich, The Politics of Education: Commonwealth Schools Policy 1973-95, 1995, p. 80 for the 1976-83 Table and pp. 93-4 for the New Schools Policy.


35

xxxvi

P. Keeves, "The Expansion and Rationale of Australian Education: To the 1990s and beyond", in L. J. Saha and J. P. Keeves (eds), Schooling and Society in Australia: Sociological Perspectives, ANU Press, 1990, p. 62.

xxxvii cf Janice Dudley and Lesley Vidovich, The Politics of Education: Commonwealth Schools Policy 1973-1995, 1995, Melbourne, p. 124.

xxxviii David McRae, Teachers Schools and Change, Melbourne/Canberra, 1988, pp. 23, 25, 191; Department of Employment, Education and Training, Annual Report 1987-88, p. 110.

xxxix Quality of Education in Australia: Report to the Commonwealth Government, Canberra, 1985, p. 188; Dudley and Vidovich, The Politics of Education, pp. 94-5.

xl " 'Buckets' of school cash drying up, warns Ryan", Sydney

Morning Herald, 24 August 1985. xli

"Rote learning might be right", leader, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 May 1987.

xlii News Release, Commonwealth Minister for Education, 28 April

1987. xliii

Connell, Reshaping Australian Education, pp. 557-8. xliv

cf A. Barcan, “Attempts to Reform Australian State Schools, 1979-1996”, Education Research and Perspectives, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1996, pp. 9-14.

xlv John Hughes with Paul Brock, Reform and Resistance in NSW

Public Education: Six Attempts at Major Reform, 1905-1995, NSW Department of Education and Training, 2008, chapter 7.

xlvi cf. School Councils. A Report of the Working Group on the

Establishment of school councils for State schools in New South Wales, 1984; A. Barcan, Two Centuries of Education in NSW, pp. 290, 309.

xlvii Cavalier, interview, Education, 30 March 1987.

xlviii Sydney Morning Herald, 16 November 1987.

xlix A. M. Badcock, Devolution at a Price. A Review of the Quality

and Equality Controls Relinquished by the Restructured Education Department of Victoria, 1988, p. 11.

l A. M. Badcock, Devolution at a Price, p. 4.

Alan Barcan

36

li Badcock, p. 297; Phillip Creed, “Betwixt and Between Changes: A

Victorian Game”, in Grant Harman, Hedley Beare, George Berkeley (eds), Restructuring School Management: Administrative Reorganisation of Public School Governance in Australia, Australian College of Education, 1991, pp. 239-242.

lii R. R. Ikin, “State school waste: Victoria‟s biggest financial

scandal, News Weekly, 24 November 1990. liii

Badcock, Devolution at a Price, pp. 281-5; Ministerial Review of Postcompulsory Schooling, Report Volume 1, 1985, p. 5.

liv Ministerial Review of Postcompulsory Schooling, pp. 34-35.

lv Sheena MacLean, "Teaching's New Priorities", The Advertiser,

Adelaide, 30 June 1981. lvi

vide G. Partington, “The Keeves Report‟s Analysis of South Australian Education”, Aces Review, August/September 1982 and October/November 1982.

lvii Bryce Saint, “Changes in Public Administration of Education:

South Australia”, in G. Harman, H. Beare and G.F. Berkeley (eds), Restructuring School Management, 1991, the report of the Public Accounts Committee, 1 December 1988, is cited on p. 193.

lviii Saint, pp. 186-190; “Devolution Watch”, The Teachers’ Journal,

17 October 1990, quoted Saint, p.196. lix

Peter Wilson and Don Smart, "Reversing the Policy Process in WA: From Top Down to Bottom Up?", in Harman, Beare, Berkeley (eds), Restructuring School Management, pp. 255, 258.

lx Wilson and Smart, "Reversing the Policy Process in WA”, in

Harman et al., p. 257; Paige Porter, John Knight, Bob Lingard, "The Efficient Corporate State: Labor Restructuring for Better Schools in Western Australia", in Lingard, Knight and Porter (eds.), Schooling Reform in Hard Times, The Falmer Press, London, 1993, pp. 243-4.

lxi Wilson and Smart, "Reversing the Policy Process in WA", in

Harman et al., pp. 266, 265. lxii

Brian J. Caldwell, “Restructuring Education in Tasmania: A Turbulent End to a Decade of Tranquility” [sic], in Harman, Beare, Berkeley (eds), Restructuring School Management, p. 207.


37

16 D. Spearitt, "Educational Achievement", in J. Keeves (ed.),

Australian Research, 1987, p. 133; The Mercury, 12 June 1984, 15 June 1984.

lxiv G. Partington, "M.A.C.O.S., S.E.M.P. and the Study of Society in

Schools", Aces Review, June 1979; Ian Matheson, "Walking on Water: Restructuring Queensland's Education System", in Harman et al (eds), Restructuring School Management, pp. 97-98, 110; W. F. Connell, Reshaping Australian Education 1960-1985, pp. 601-2.

lxv "Educational Standards", The Canberra Times, 27 June 1983.

lxvi G. Burkhardt and M. March, "Educational Restructuring in the

ACT Government School System", in G. Harman, et al. (eds), pp. 77-78, 86.

lxvii Kerry Moir, "Ideals to Action: Corporate management within the Northern Territory Education Department", in G. Harman, et al., pp. 155-6.

lxviii Kerry Moir, “Ideals to Action”, in G. Harman, et al. (eds), p. 156.

lxix Dr Eedle, "Annual Report, 1978", in G. Harman, et al. (eds), p.

165 lxx

Moir, in G. Harman, et al. (eds), p. 167. lxxi

Michael Bradley, "Secondary School Organisations: Trends and changes in the Northern Territory", pp. 3-4, Paper No. 9, Liberating Curriculum Conference, Australian Curriculum Studies Association, July 1991.

lxxii The Literacy Challenge, Report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training, AGPS, Canberra, 1993, p. 2.

lxxiii Sydney Morning Herald, 3 July 1984.

lxxiv “Foreword”, Skills for Australia, J. S. Dawkins and A. C. Holding, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1987.

Documents

Public Schools in Australia from the late 1970s to the ...erpjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/ERPV37-2.-Barcan-A.-2010... · Education Research and Perspectives, Vol.37, No.2